.NET is Free

.NET is an open-source developer platform with no licensing costs and free development tools for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

No licensing costs

The programming languages, compilers, libraries, and runtimes that make up the .NET platform are all free. There are no licensing costs, including for commercial use.

The latest versions of .NET, known as .NET Core, are all open-source and maintained by Microsoft and the .NET community on GitHub.

Free tools for your operating system

Visual Studio Code is a free code editor for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Extensions for the C# and F# programming languages make Visual Studio Code a great choice for .NET developers.

Visual Studio Community is fully-featured, extensible, and free integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS and Windows. Visual Studio has built-in support for building any type of .NET application.

There are also command line tools and plugins for many popular editors, such as Atom, Brackets, Sublime Text, Emacs, and Vim.

Fully supported

While you can build your own version of .NET from source code, most developers use the free, officially supported releases that are built and tested on Microsoft-maintained servers in Azure and supported just like any Microsoft product.

Some enterprise customers chose to pay for commercial support solutions with Microsoft. If you already have a support solution with Microsoft, then .NET is covered.